Driving Website Traffic:
The Fastest, Cheapest and Most Ignored Method

True or False: All website traffic is created equal?
FALSE! And if you answered true, you need to read and reread this article carefully.

One of the first assumptions new affiliate marketers make about their business is that any traffic to their website is good traffic. That’s partly true and it seems logical. Brick and mortar businesses love when you come into their store and browse. Browsing will either lead to a sale or not, but it doesn’t cost the business anything. For them, any traffic is good traffic.

But there’s one very big difference between someone browsing a brick and mortar store and someone browsing your online website. Chances are very good that you have already paid a fee to get that person to your site. You invest in every person who enters your site via online advertising, making the quality of your traffic very important.

Essentially there are three ways to drive traffic your way.

• Buy It. The most popular online advertising is Google Adwords (the small, classified ads you see on search pages). The ads themselves do not cost you anything. It’s when someone clicks on the ad and is directed to your site or the site of the product you are advertising that you are then charged a fee, based on a complicated formula of keywords and relevancy. This is very often the first (and sometimes only) advertising strategy new affiliate marketers utilize. Lots and lots of money is spent, with seemingly uneven and unpredictable effectiveness.
• Borrow It. Being linked to another highly trafficked, highly relevant website is a great way to get your site out there. There are many ways to accomplish this, but it is by no means easy. Opportunities exist for you to link reciprocally with another site, resulting in good payoffs for you both. But finding these opportunities and reaching agreements while holding down costs can be a big challenge.
• Redo It. Marketing research tells us that consumer loyalty is a precious commodity. A return visitor to your site is sending a loud and clear message to you. It’s amazing how many affiliate marketers completely ignore this incredible opportunity to capture the buying loyalty of their visitors.

So What’s the Redo Method?

Think of this method of advertising as a reclaiming process. You are targeting individuals who have visited your site in the past, and through a variety of different strategies, you are reclaiming their patronage, and hopefully increasing your name awareness and credibility as a seller. Once you’ve captured a visitor’s information, whether they’ve purchased or not, you have created a pool of targeted leads for future promotion and advertising efforts.

One of the most popular methods of reclaiming or redoing marketing is to produce a newsletter and have visitors sign up to receive it. A well done and timely newsletter will put your product in front of your customer with all the punch of an informative and intuitive sales pitch. It offers the customer something for nothing; information, helpful links and related articles. It goes a long way toward site/product recognition, and people buy things they are familiar with.

Another way to recycle previous traffic is to make enticing offers or deals on products, or to offer brief tutorials that deliver valuable information in easy to digest formulas. However you get people back for that second, third or twentieth visit, you are capitalizing on all of the “ins” that marketers are searching for.

Successful affiliate marketers take full advantage of this reclaiming or redoing form of marketing. If you’re sitting with a list of email addresses from people who have taken the time to visit your site, and you’re not doing anything with it beyond merely keeping track, you are making a huge mistake. It doesn’t even require your money to use this form of marketing. But it does require your time; time to mine those lists for all the gold that lies within.